Employee Rewards
If you’re a supervisor or
manager, you probably know how much more productive your team is when you make
the effort to recognize each person’s contribution. In order to take employee recognition to the next level, however, and
establish a company-wide system of rewards, you’ll need to be able to present
the investment to your CEO or CFO in terms of the financial bottom line.
Fortunately,
a growing body of research makes this easy. A Workplace Trends
Report finds that recognition programs yield 50 percent higher sales. With
a solid positive ROI to back it up, an employee recognition program can be
treated as part of your company’s overall strategy. In recognition in the
workplace points out, “While recognition is not new, it is finally becoming
more strategic as programs align recognition with business objectives and
desired behavior.” Here’s some of the research that describes the nuts and
bolts of why rewarding employees ends up boosting the company’s bottom line:
Rewards and Recognition Strengthen Employee Engagement
The
benefits of expressing your appreciation of employees begin with
engagement. Unengaged employees can cost your business thousands of dollars,
because they’re not concerned about being efficient during their work hours.
Instead, they tend to waste time and engage in countless distractions, just
trying to get through the day in whatever way they can.
If you
have an employee who wastes just 15 minutes a day, that’s an hour and a quarter
per week, or 3.125 percent of a work week. To avoid the lost revenue of
alienated workers, you might be tempted to block social media sites from
company computers, or institute various rules about not coming back late from
breaks. However, the fact is that what really motivates people is positive
reinforcement. Recognition is the number one driver of employee
engagement, according to us. Every 1 percent increase in engagement results in
an additional .6 percent growth in your company’s sales. The Cornell research
paper mentioned above notes that when employee engagement varies, percent of
that variation is directly due to the amount and quality of recognition that the employee receives.
Engaged Employees Show Up and Pay Attention
Balancing
work and outside life is tricky for everyone as our lives become more complex,
but when employees are highly engaged in their jobs, they manage to show up to
work despite the outside commitments that compete for their time. In a research
study states that engaged employees take fewer than three sick days each year, on
average, while disengaged ones take more than six sick days. Your HR department
is probably all too well-acquainted with the high cost of accidents and
absences, and anything you can do to reduce these figures will contribute to
the long-term sustainability of your organization.
There’s Space for Your Company at the Front of the Pack
Despite
the proven fact that dedicating resources to employee recognition is financially prudent, many organizations still hesitate to follow through with this
strategy. “One of the top concerns for HR executives is how to raise employee
engagement, and for good reason. Engagement is on the decline across the world,
and that spells trouble for business leaders everywhere.”
Fewer
than one-third of employees would strongly agree with the statement that
they have received recognition or praise for doing good work within the last
seven days. The authors of this Gallup study state that the role of recognition
in producing engagement “might be one of the greatest missed opportunities for
leaders and managers… in their search for new ideas and approaches,
organizations could be overlooking one of the most easily executed strategies:
employee recognition.” The fact that many companies are still missing out on
the benefits of having a strong employee rewards program means that
you can gain extra ground on your competitors by putting the power of recognition to work in your organization.
Employee Recognition Is Key to Staying Competitive
It’s
beautifully logical, when you put it all together: Embracing a system to
optimize employee appreciation and recognize others within your company will
yield an abundance of benefits. According to the Cornell research,“Recognition programs, on their own, can
help in still and reinforce corporate values, help with retention, and
positively impact financial results. They also boost productivity, engagement,
profit margins, customer retention, employee retention, ROE and ROA.” Taken
together, these advantages will provide a robust return on your investment to
recognize employees. Furthermore, they will add luster to your employer brand
and help you compete for the top talent in your industry.
To learn
more about how to recognize employees and build a strong business in a time of
declining employee engagement, download our E-book
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